Your people. Our passion.
Understand the fundamentals of building an engaged workforce
Employee engagement goes beyond motivation and simple job satisfaction. It can be seen as a combination of commitment to the organisation and its values and a willingness to help colleagues. Here you'll find information on engagement, employee commitment, morale, loyalty, motivation, job satisfaction, and employee attitude and engagement surveys.
Introduction
Employees who have good quality jobs and are managed well, will not only be happier, healthier and more fulfilled, but are also more likely to drive productivity, better products or services, and innovation. This mutual gain view of motivation and people management lies at the heart of employee engagement, a concept that’s become increasingly mainstream in management thinking over the last decade.
What is Employee Engagement?
The idea of employee engagement focuses on mutual gains in employment relationships, seeking the good of employees (well-being, job satisfaction and so on) and the good of the organisation they work for (performance, commitment, and so on).
Employee engagement brings together and repackages older and more established concepts, in particular work motivation and organisational commitment. Other relevant concepts include job satisfaction, passion and enthusiasm, identifying with one’s work, playing to one’s strengths, absorption and energy in doing work, citizenship behaviour, and shared purpose or alignment to strategy.
There’s no common understanding of employee engagement. For example, the 2009 MacLeod Review found over 50 definitions! One of the earliest is Kahn's which focuses on how people ‘express themselves physically, cognitively, and emotionally’ as they interact with their jobs. This describes an internal state of being but one which relates closely to behaviour, such as discretionary effort or ‘going the extra mile’.
Other definitions are closer to job satisfaction. These relate to a number of aspects of organisational life and are typically used by consultancies. For example, Gallup’s Q12 questionnaire covers job clarity, job resources, work that plays to one’s strengths, recognition, social support and cohesion, personal development, employee voice, the meaningfulness of work, and colleagues’ motivation.
A narrower, more specific view is that of the Utrecht University group of occupational psychologists which defines ‘work engagement’ as a state of mind in which, rather than being burnt out, employees show:
- vigour (energy, resilience and effort)
- dedication (for example, enthusiasm, inspiration and pride)
- absorption (concentration and being engrossed in one’s work).
Is Employee Engagement a Useful Concept?
A sustained focus on employee engagement over the last decade or so has been key in getting progressive people management practices firmly onto employers’ agendas. It’s become part of management practice to an extent that other concepts, such as high-performance working, have not.
However, it’s also faced considerable criticism, not least because of the lack of agreement on what it is. Some HR practitioners seem content with this situation. In being a ‘broad church’, engagement is an umbrella term to describe a multifaceted focus of people management. Employers can shape their view of engagement to suit their context or strategy.
But the lack of consensus on what engagement is has led to many different ways to gauge it and inconsistent advice on how to achieve it. Vague or overly broad definitions hamper effective action, as it’s unclear what the problem or opportunity is, or what should be done.
We recommend that employers take one of two approaches:
- Focus on specific and well-established definitions, such as the Utrecht work on engagement.
- If using ‘engagement’ as a wider umbrella term, break it down into more specific areas that can be understood and acted upon more clearly.
A broad employee engagement strategy might focus on:
- Motivation: how workers guide their efforts to achieve goals, including intrinsic motivation (enjoying work for its own sake) and extrinsic motivation (working to get a reward).
- Organisational citizenship behaviour: going the extra mile and helping colleagues or the organisation beyond what the job requires.
- Organisational commitment: feeling attached to the organisation and intending to stay.
- Job satisfaction: how content workers are with various aspects of their work, employment and organisational life.
The Benefits of Employee Engagement
Feeling engaged is evidently good for workers. Most definitions of engagement describe employees who are healthier, happier, more fulfilled or more motivated. For organisations, research has repeatedly shown that measures of engagement go hand in hand with higher performance. More broadly, other research shows that positive relationships between aspects of employee engagement and various other business metrics, including customer satisfaction, productivity, innovation, staff retention, efficiency and health and safety performance.
This research has its problems though. The great majority of studies show correlation but not causation. That is to say, they may reflect that employee engagement contributes to performance, but it could equally be the other way round – people feel more engaged if they work in successful teams or organisations. However, there is some research that shows causal relationships, for example between short-term happiness and performance.
Employee Engagement Strategies
Successful employee engagement strategies will make use of a range of good people management and learning and development practices. They should be holistic, for example by focusing on employee motivation and well-being, and helping employees understand their contribution to the organisation’s purpose, objectives and culture.
Strategies should also be multi-pronged, aligning communications, HR policies and systems, learning and development and cross-organisational events. As such, they require the active buy-in and support of senior leaders and line managers throughout the organisation
Some employees will naturally be more engaged than others and person-job fit will also heavily influence engagement. This means that recruitment practices and performance management are also important tools for building an engaged motivated workforce.